I'm Not There Quotes

[last lines]

Billy the Kid: It's like you got yesterday, today and tomorrow, all in the same room. There's no telling what can happen.

Reporter: Jude! One word for your fans?

Jude: Astronaut.

Jude: Look at all these medicines! Hey man what are those?

Man At Party: Mandy's, make you sleep.

Jude: Sleep? aint sleepin'... Sleep's for dreamers. I haven't slept in thirty days, man. Takes a lot of medicine to keep up this pace.

Jude: Doesn't really matter, you know, what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. But, uh, folk music is just a word, you know, that I can't use anymore. What I'm talking about is traditional music, right, which is to say it's mathematical music, it's based on hexagons. But all these songs about, you know, roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans are turning into angels - I mean, you know, they're not going to die. They're not folk music songs. They're political songs. They're already dead. You'd think that these traditional music people would - would gather that mystery, you know, is a traditional fact, you know, seeing as they're all so full of mystery.

Keenan Jones: And contradictions.

Jude: Yeah, contradictions.

Keenan Jones: And chaos.

Jude: Yes, it's chaos, clocks, and watermelons - you know, it's - it's everything. These people actually think I have some kind of, uh... fantastic imagination. It gets very, uh, lonesome. But traditional music is just, uh... it's too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be protected. You know, I mean, in that music is the only true valid death you can feel today, you know, off a record player. But like everything else in great demand, people try to own it. Has to do with, like, uh, the purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows I'm not a folk singer.

Claire: I would like to know what is at the center of your world.

Robbie Clark: Well, I'm 22, I guess I would say me.

[first lines]

Narrator: There he lies. God rest his soul, and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness, and his phone numbers. There he lay: poet, prophet, outlaw, fake, star of electricity. Nailed by a peeping tom, who would soon discover...

Jude: A poem is like a naked person...

Narrator: - even the ghost was more than one person.

Arthur: ...but a song is something that walks by itself.

Hobo Joe: [Woody shows Hobo Joe and Hobo Moe his guitar case which says 'THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS'] You wouldn't be stashing no weapons in there, son?

Woody Guthrie: No sir, not in any literalized way.

Jude: You know, saying 'cause of peace', it's like saying, 'hunk of butter', you know, I don't want you to listen to anybody who wants you to believe is dedicated to the hunk and not the butter.

Reporter: I'm not sure I follow.

Jude: You know, I didn't come out of some cereal box. There's no one out there who's gonna be converted by a song.

Jack Rollins: [looking up in the sky] It's hard not to go to Hell.There's so many distractions,so many influences.Start walking right and pretty soon,there's someone gonna drag you down.Sure as we're living,sure as we're born,look up,look up,

[there are three angels in the sky with trumpets]

Jack Rollins: Gabriel blows his horn.

Woody Guthrie: [the jump cut into this scene occurs after Hobo Joe or Hobo Moe has, apparently, asked the 11-year-old African American boy who call himself Woody Guthrie where he's from] Well, Missouri, originally. A little town called Riddle.

Hobo Joe: [the rest of this dialogue is an almost exact paraphrase of dialogue from the 1957 film, A Face in the Crowd] Uh, is there really a town called Riddle?

Woody Guthrie: Well, tell you the flat truth, it's just a sort of a whatchamacallit, a...

Hobo Joe: ...A composite.

Woody Guthrie: Compost heap's more like it.

Keenan Jones: Yes, I was going to ask Mr. Quinn why he insists on putting us and the rest of the world on so? Some might be persuaded to doubt his sincerity.

Jude: Well, who said I was sincere?

Keenan Jones: Are you saying you're not sincere?

Jude: No more than you, you know? No more sincere than you are. See, you just want me to say what you want me to say.